Tess pauses at that, letting her weight sag against him. A part of her figures it is the worst, another part wonders if it really is all that different from home. She thinks about that last morning in the QZ, before all this, how she'd glanced at a bunch of arrested citizens lined up in the streets and just kept walking when the guns had come out. How she'd complained to Joel about the smell of the smuggling tunnels ten minutes later, more concerned about garbage disposal than the ritual execution of the infected.

Us catches her.

"I want out of here," she says, finally. "But I'm fine. Twenty years, what's one more outbreak for me, right? But you haven't done this before."

An unavoidable thought: she has to get him out of here.